I have always thought that mothers and grandmothers often deserve a medal for bravery and perseverance. However, I am sorry to see that they remain so convinced that they alone have to bear the brunt of the fight against social injustice and climate change. The urgency we must feel in the face of issues of the utmost importance must be a concern for everyone, whether or not they are young, old, parents, grandparents.
In June 2020, it was a balm for me to read a collection of literary texts entitled Nulliparous, work of a collective led by Claire Legendre (Hammac editions) on a taboo subject: the experience of women without children. It was time. Nulliparous do not live in a vacuum, centered on the navel, indifferent to questions affecting the younger generation.
Wanting children, not wanting them, not being able to have them, this is not necessarily a dilemma that solo women ruminate on. As a longtime feminist, I have never understood why women campaigned for the free choice to dispose of their bodies as they saw fit and the right to abortion, but could be so imbued with prejudice against women without children, judging them wrongly and through, almost excluding them from social struggles aimed at remedying inequities. Isn’t this paradoxical or, at least, illogical?
Motherhood is not a feat of arms. And yet. If you don’t have children or grandchildren, you seem to constantly have to justify yourself. In the still predominant binary world, the non-mother is basically half a woman, but the non-father is 100% man.
Dear fellow feminists, I urge you to think differently, with consistency. The free choice and the right to abortion imply that the woman will never have to justify the non-procreation or the absence of offspring, nor to tell her private life, nor to relate the miscarriage experienced as a bereavement. , even a trauma, not to say a bitter failure in societal indifference, nor to expose the failures of assisted procreation.
On this Mother’s Day 2022, when mothers and grandmothers are invited to demonstrate in Quebec for the rest of the world, let’s also think about including nulliparas and nulligests, who are not dummies, but who are, on the contrary, ready to support any fight for social justice and a better climate future.